Extending Intercom CRM to Facebook Ads [Guide]

by Matt Wheeler

Consider that, 65% of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users check Facebook every day. There is a good chance, no matter what your business, that your target market visit and interact with content on Facebook every day. Just like email, starting conversations on channels like Facebook can drive actions with your product, increase brand loyalty and generate referrals.

In this guide, we're going to talk through a cutting edge, but simple Social Media Ads strategy to increase conversion rates, acquire new customers and even upsell using the wonderful Intercom platform, and Driftrock Flow.

An introduction

Services like Intercom allows us to increase conversion rates of our funnel through email and in-app messaging. By creating segments from customer data and interactions with your product, you can send messages to your customers at the right times to help them through the conversion funnel, use your product more regularly or refer their friends.

However, email and your website obviously aren't the only places your customers spend their time. Between Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, your emails are fighting for attention! You can leverage these platforms to join in the conversations your customers are having on these platforms to drive conversions on your own product.

Facebook, Twitter and more recently Google, allow you to upload customer records to their ad platforms, so you can run ads targeting messages at your customers (or new customers similar to your existing ones!). A one size fits all “Advert” is pretty boring, but tailoring messages for different customer segments at different stages in their lifecycle, provides useful content for your customers, and improves your own conversion rates.

At Driftrock, we’ve launched an Intercom integration that syncs your Intercom segments with Facebook Custom Audiences, every 3 hours. This means that as customers move from segment to segment, you can mirror messaging on Facebook through ads. It increases brand loyalty, funnel conversion rates and can be used in Lookalikes to find similar customers.

How it works

It may sound complicated at first but we assure you, it's probably the simplest of all ad targeting techniques once you get going!

If you’re not familiar with, or not using Facebook Custom audiences, then you are missing a trick. It allows you to upload your own customer records (emails FB Ids etc, match them to Facebook users to either:

Target them with ads,

Exclude them from ads

Target ads at new potential customers on Facebook who are similar to your current customers.

What makes Intercom special is that you've already done the hard work segmenting your users into different stages of the conversion funnel. You can use these segments to create Custom Audiences. For example, a typical SaaS conversion funnel might look like this:

A customer reads your PDF guide in exchange for their email address.

You following up with a relevant product.

The customer registers for a free trial.

At the end of the trial they subscribe to the product.

You upsell additional relevant products over time or generate referrals.

Hopefully you are already using Intercom to help customers through this journey. Extending this to Facebook, further fuels the fire.

For example, we run ads to customers who have registered on Driftrock for a free trial, but not subscribed yet. We present a simple guide on how to make the most of the tool, which complements our existing email activity.

Just like email automation, once a customer buys our product, we no longer want to serve ads reminding them to buy. Instead, a useful ad might be a reminder to refer a friend or take a look at a different product.

How to get started

At Driftrock, we've built a tool called Flow, that syncs Intercom segments to automatically update Facebook Custom Audiences as your customers move through the different stages in their life.

Every 3 hours we update each of your Facebook Custom Audiences using the Intercom API for each segment. For example, this might remove customers that were originally in the free trial segment and move them to the purchased bucket. It means your customers receive relevant ads at all times, just like email automation.

It’s super simple to setup:

Setup your Driftrock account with Flow

Connect up Intercom and Facebook via our simple OAuth wizard.

Create new Custom Audiences or automate existing ones.

Create campaigns using your new dynamic Custom Audiences.

Acquiring new customers using Lookalikes

It goes without saying that if you could generate a constant stream of customers that look like your best ones, you would take this all day. It always surprises me how few people know and use Facebook's Lookalike audiences, which does this exact thing.

Rather than targeting your existing customers, Facebook looks for common characteristics with other Facebook users (normally with incredible accuracy) and serves them ads. Simply, create a Lookalike Audience from your best performing customers and set up ads (we recommend 1,000+ emails and the more the better).

Once you’ve setup your Intercom syncs for normal Custom Audiences, jump into Facebook or Driftrock Flow and create Lookalike Audiences using those Custom Audiences. Flow is constantly syncing your Custom Audience seed, so over time, your Lookalike audiences will improve in quality, as you acquire new customers. It’s a beautiful 360 marketing loop.

To start syncing today, get in touch with us by requesting a demo here